No Other Portland Brewery Does Food Like Burnside

The food focus extends to the beer, too.

Burnside Brewing (Cameron Browne)
By Matthew Korfhage

701 E Burnside St., 503-946-8151, burnsidebrewco.com. 11 am-10 pm Sunday-Tuesday, 11 am-11 pm Wednesday-Saturday, 11 am-midnight Friday-Saturday.

Pretty much no other brewery has made food as big a focus as Burnside in the eight years it's been open—and in the past two years the LoBu brewery has doubled down with a truly excellent and tender pork belly plate, and maybe the only Spanish octopus dish in a Portland brewpub. But that focus extends to the beer, from its flagship Scotch Bonnet and apricot Sweet Heat to malt-balanced IPAs that pair well with food but can also sometimes come on a bit muddy. On a winter visit, a wheatberry wine had aged very well in the months since the brewery hosted June's Fruit Beer Fest—one of the best parking-lot drinking weekends in Portland—and the Thundarr the Bavarian Hefe offered up lovely clove and banana notes. The darks and barrel beers were the most impressive, however, especially a round and peaty Owd Cappy Mac Scotch ale and a truly impressive Flanders Red, mixing 18-month and two-year barrel-aged batches to create layers of bright acidity, dark-cherry notes and warming oak. It was a hell of a beer, perfect for pairing with Burnside's mussels or steak frites.

Nearby: Tucked behind the brewery on Northeast Couch Street, stop in at Cider Riot (807 NE Couch St., 503-662-8275, ciderriot.com) for a mix of goofily inventive and deeply traditional English ciders including a mind-shatteringly good single-varietal Yarlington Mill that's both softly velvety and satisfyingly tannic without a hint of sugary sweetness.

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